On the Impact of Code Obfuscation to Software Energy Consumption

The energy consumption of software systems is an area of increasing interest, especially for mobile application developers. A number of studies have been published that address possible optimizations of energy use and linked quality attributes such as performance. Of equal importance are, at least for commercial software systems, the protection of intellectual knowledge (IP) and the fight against software piracy (e.g., by code obfuscation to prevent reverse engineering). The mutual relations between energy consumption and IP protection force developers to strike a balance between them. This paper reports on the results of an empirical study on the effects of code level obfuscation by executing a number of usage scenarios across a set of ten Android applications. Results indicate that code-level obfuscation can have a significant impact on energy usage and performance and are likely to increase than decrease.